Forced Entertainment: The Coming Storm

In this new work international innovators Forced Entertainment tangle and cross-cut multiple stories to make a compelling and unstable performance. From love and death to sex and laundry, from shipwrecks to falling snow, personal anecdotes rub shoulders with imaginary movies, and half-remembered novels bump into distorted fairytales.

Using a method as inventive as it is absurd, six performers create, collaborate, ambush and disrupt this epic saga that is resolutely too big for the stage. The result is comical, contradictory and poignant; full of wrongheaded tricks, broken dances, sleazy drum interruptions and perfunctory piano accompaniment. Everything builds and everything shimmers. Everything teeters and everything trembles. Everything is reshaped and everything is cannibalised.

The Coming Storm is Forced Entertainment at its best – trademark black humour, a collage of arresting images and an anarchic performance style.

In this latest project, the company expand their recent forays into narrative explored in the graphic novel picaresque Void Story, as well as in the roots of Artistic Director Tim Etchells’ fiction writing, especially the collection Endland Stories. This new performance involves a cast of six performers (the regular core team Robin Arthur, Cathy Naden, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall and Terry O’Connor plus Phil Hayes who worked with the company on The Thrill of It All). Director and writer Tim Etchells are joined again by lighting designer Nigel Edwards and collaborating again with sound designer and composer John Avery, the new project will also feature live music for the first time in the group’s work.

There will be a free post-show discussion after the Monday performance (29 October).